The United States needs to continue providing an environment that will help attract top talent from around the world to contribute to innovation, Sanjay Mehrotra, the Kanpur-born CEO of Micron Technology, said.

Immigration, H-1B visas, attracting talent -- not just for studying but also for those who stay on -- and creating jobs are important, Mehrotra, who co-founded Sandisk along with a Chinese and an Israeli immigrant, told ET in an interview. Sandisk was acquired by Western Digital in 2016.

“I am a great example of, you know, an immigrant. Of course, I have created several jobs here in the US and I look forward to policies and opportunities to continue to make America that magnet of bringing top talent...,” he said. Micron, a Nasdaq-listed memory and storage solutions provider with revenues of $23.4 billion in fiscal year 2019, is the world’s fourth largest semiconductor company.

Mehrotra also pointed out that entrepreneurship is flourishing in India and the country needs to promote research in universities, collaboration between top universities and industry, along with greater influx of venture capital, in order to mirror Silicon Valley.

“I think you are seeing more entrepreneurship happening in India, you are starting to see more semiconductor design companies happening in India as well … compared to Silicon Valley, it is years behind, but I think entrepreneurship is gaining momentum,” Mehrotra, who holds more than 70 patents, said.

Systems and policies need to be made simpler for businesses in India, he said.

“I think young companies shouldn't have to struggle trying to figure out how to be running their business; they need to be able to focus on new ideas and execution of those ideas, rather than trying to figure out how to work the system,” said Mehrotra, who studied at BITS Pillani before graduating in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Micron, though a late entrant into India, has huge plans for the country.

In October, the company inaugurated its new global research and development centre in Hyderabad, which is expected to become one of its largest centres globally.

Micron established its first India office in Bengaluru in January last year and now both the centres collaborate with its other centres across the world on technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, 5G and machine learning. The company currently employs nearly 1,000 people in India and is planning to scale up significantly in the year ahead.

Mehrotra said the company has no plans to move manufacturing of memory devices to India despite the government rolling out the red carpet for manufacturers.

Micron believes in constantly updating existing facilities in countries such as Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, China, as well as Malaysia, instead of investing in new ones, he said.

“India is very important in terms of availability of strong talent and this is a primary reason to move there. We have had great success in recruiting top talent from the top universities in India and that's helping us expand our presence,” Mehrotra said.

Micron also considers India as a large market for smartphones and data centres. “India is a great market for memory as well as storage, and certainly a growing market, I think, when you look at smartphones.”

Since the highest growth for smartphones globally is coming from India, more memory and storage is needed, he said. “Content also means that there is more need for data centres, cloud operations and our memory storage is critical in data centre applications.”

The company is betting big on 5G and AI, which are expected to lead a major boom in connected devices and data ecosystem.

“Perhaps less than 10% of the data that gets created is used in any fashion...AI will be key in extracting intelligence from the data,” he said.